I’m nervous about having the Windows biometric (fingerprint) login for the Windows App and Chrome plug-in offering a Windows PIN login as an alternative. Can it be disabled, or require the master password instead of a weak 4-digit PIN?
On the family PC others have the PIN that I don’t necessarily want to give access to my Bitwarden vault.
On the settings page, there is an “unlock with biometrics”. If unchecked, you will need to use your Master Password to login.
You might consider setting up different Windows accounts for each user. This way everyone gets their own favorites, browsing history, etc. too.
@stephend Welxome to the forum!
You seem to be asking a question about the Bitwarden Password Manager, and not proposing a new feature for the Bitwarden stand-alone Authenticator App for iOS/Android, so I have moved your post to appropriate section of the forum. If I have misunderstood the intent of your post or what product you are asking about, please let me know, so that I can place your post in the correct section of the Community Forum.
As already pointed out by @DenBesten, you should probably disable biometric unlock for your Bitwarden apps and extensions, and instead unlock your vault using the master password or a PIN that is different from your Windows PIN. If enabling a PIN for unlocking your Bitwarden vault, nonmobile devices allow you to use a non-numeric PIN (i.e., a password or passphrase containing any type of character) of arbitrary length.
Adding to what @DenBesten said, having separate accounts will also allow restricting some accounts to be non-admin, which are less likely to be able to install malware, etc.
If feasible, having your own exclusive computer to do/store sensitive stuffs may be safer in the long run.
I would like to continue using biometric login as it is very secure and most of all convenient - it’s why I moved to the paid version of Bitwarden. My master password is very long and full of random characters (as it should be), and I certainly never want to have to type that in if possible.
Leveraging the biometric feature of Windows Hello means having to accept their 4-digit PIN bypass if that is set-up on your PC, and that seems a risky way to implement this feature, as it doesn’t even require 2FA that you may have setup with Bitwarden (as I do).
It seems to me it would be more secure not to offer any alternative to biometrics when using a biometric login device. If you need to sign in using a master password you can, of course, still do that in the normal way.
To achieve this, I think Bitwarden would need to implement their own biometric login function rather than utilising Windows Hello (I recall this is how LastPass biometrics worked).
Unfortunately, I need to allow others to have access to my Windows login for operation reasons (as the airlines would say). I just don’t like the idea that this hands over the keys to my Bitwarden vault at the same time if I also want the convenience (and, normally, security) of a biometric login.
The Hello pin is inherently 2FA in that it only works locally on the PC. The PC itself is the “something you have” factor and the knowledge of the PIN is the “something you know”. Here is a conversation that delves further into this.
True for the “keep bad guys out” definition of secure, but having no “plan-B” is terribly insecure when defining secure as “make sure I don’t lose it”.
I perhaps wasn’t clear - the Plan B would be to use your master password in the normal way in lieu of any biometric login attempt. That is always available.
Thank you - sorry for the misplaced post!
Biometrics is only available for unlocking a vault that is already logged in; there is no “biometric login” in Bitwarden. And biometric unlocking is available also in the free version of Bitwarden.
Master password should be a randomly generated passphrase consisting of four random words, with no special characters other than the word separator (e.g., hyphen or space). Such passphrases are secure and not difficult to type. You should definitely be typing in your full master password each time that you open the extension after you first start your browser (i.e., do not disable the setting the "lock with master password on browser restart), at a minimum.
This is because you are not actually logging in, you are just unlocking a vault that is already logged in.
You could propose this as a feature request.